It’s that time of year when inside the house stays cooler than outside, when the waning warmth of the morning sun can’t compete with the chill of the evening. Last night I shut the windows. I’m figuring that’s a metaphor.

I have friends coming for dinner tonight, and they are hoping for a movie. I advised sleeping bags, down comforters and dressing in layers. Maybe we’ll watch The Day After Tomorrow. That too could be a metaphor.

I don’t think I ever had a favorite pair of shoes when I was a kid. If I needed a new pair, my mother would drag me to the shoe store where I’d play around while she looked. I’d use the silver sliding sizer to check my foot size, put my foot into the x-ray machine to see my bones and pick shoes off the racks and try them on, size notwithstanding. Meanwhile, my mother would shop. She looked for shoes which fit the family budget and would wear well. Buster Brown shoes were a favorite of hers. They were for me too but only because they were the sponsors of Andy’s Gang, one of my favorites on Saturday Mornings. I remember the commercials where Buster spoke from inside the shoe, “This is my dog Tige, he lives in a shoe, I’m Buster Brown, look for me in there, too.” I was always proud to carry home a box of Buster Brown shoes.

Because all our shoes were tie shoes, learning to tie the laces was a rite of passage and a necessity before starting school. My mother taught me. I still remember her sitting in the chair by the picture window while I knelt on the floor beside the arm of her chair. She took a shoe and slowly, one step at a time, showed me how to tie it. My fingers took a while to work. They fumbled with the loops, and I lost them several times, but my mother was patient. We did it over and over until I finally tied the shoe. The knot was loose, but it is still one of my greatest triumphs.